Ok i have a kinda dumb question that i am having trouble finding answers for, but what is the deal with Fandom (the site/company with all the wikis) sorry to ask but the name is so painfully generic i am having trouble finding info rip
@hope-punk put it pretty well in the replies of my post, so I hope they won't mind me quoting them here
if you've tried to look up a media specific wiki, you'll probably have found a Fandom wiki. That's Fandom with a capital, because they're a specific company. They operate a large wiki system that invites people to make wikis for whatever they want, and boast being the platform for many major wikis like the Minecraft wiki and Zelda wiki. However, going on a Fandom wiki will quickly make apparent the bad side of using Fandom wikis,
Fandom forces large, intrusive ads, auto play videos, the whole works onto the page, to the point where it becomes extremely unpleasant to use. In addition to this, they limit what you can do with your wiki compared to independent wikis or even other wiki networks, forcing large yellow sidebars and limited layouts. There's also pushes to make it a kind of social network with comments and such (which is… not what a wiki needs, at least in the format forced).
In addition to this, Fandom the company is quite frankly rabid in their push to consume or subsume fandom, hobby and media platforms. They recently acquired amongst other companies, Gamespot and GameFAQs, as well as other wiki platforms in the past. It takes a concerted effort to try and remain out of the grasp of Fandom the company, such as the wild steps the Blaseball fandom took to escape that someone added, or the Nintendo Independent Wiki Network
some other notable Fandom Crimes:
They purged LGBT-related wikis in an attempt to merge almost all of them into One Single LGBT Wiki, which is a nightmare idea considering the LGBTQ+ community is not a single unified monolith. Microlabels that were previously documented on the now-purged wikis were not considered notable enough to be documented on the merged wiki, and were instead directed to the Ezgender Wiki, placing an undue burden on wiki staff who weren't consulted about any of this in advance
On popular wikis, they'll sometimes put auto-playing videos on wiki pages outside of the wiki editors' control. These videos can contain spoilers or irrelevant/inaccurate information
Acquired Gamepedia, a competing wiki farm, and forcibly converted all of those wikis to Fandom's format. This is why Zelda Wiki, a founding member of the Nintendo Independent Wiki Alliance, is now on Fandom
Acquired and shut down Strawpoll.me
As I alluded to in the original post, you don't really "own" your wiki, and if your wiki makes Fandom a lot of ad revenue, they have a vested interest in keeping it up and running. If you make it obvious that you're trying to migrate or shut down such a wiki, they can simply get rid of you, replace you with new mods/admins, and revert anything they deem "vandalism" (basically, all signs that you were trying to migrate)
edit: can't believe I forgot to mention this but they've worked with the U.S. military
also reading Fandom wikis on mobile looks like this: